Quilt Blocks – Page 5 – OccasionalPiece

It’s Cross-X Blocks time again! The last Friday of every month, Krista of KristaStitched and I post about our swaps that we’ve done. Above are the eight blocks I made for February, four for Krista and four for me. Our Flickr group is *here* if you want to see what everyone is doing.

Here’s mine, all alone after sending my blocks off to her.

My organizing fetish surges to the front at times like this, as I like to see our progress. Krista’s ahead of me, having sent me two March blocks. I have to get going to keep up with her!

And here they are, all together. I can’t believe the number of blocks is growing this fast.

I like playing with the blocks because I get to look more closely at what Krista’s been up to. Here are four of my recent favorites of hers (above and below).

And one last shot of the blocks, made up in Madrona Road (with a few oldies). I hope Krista has her sunglasses!

SantasVillage quilt top

After three days of sewing non-stop, except for the time when I went out to Costco to buy vegetables, or the time I took to talk on the phone to my mother and others, I finished the quilt top for Santa’s Village. (My apologies if you heard the sewing machine whirring along while we talked.) Pattern Plusses: the very cute Santa in the middle. Pattern Minuses: the directions that needed to go to about 20 more pattern testers before they released it to the public. I’ll have an errata sheet later on, when I’m not bonkers from sewing.

This is where I started this morning. Only I think I only had one side on the roofs of the houses. Hard to remember.

Houses and trees done and arranged. I’m tired, but I press on. I want to be done with the quilt top before I stop.

Oh, and Friday I finished up Leanne’s quilt blocks for the Always Bee Learning Bee. And finally the weather started to turn from the near 90-degree weather on Thursday to something more respectably autumn-like. At her house in Canada, Leanne had snow. Shoveling snow can make you tired.

I became even more tired when I called for reservations at The Fancy Restaurant for Thanksgiving and was told they were already booked up. (All of our children and their families are scattered to in-laws or other, and this is just not the year to cook.) But the Other Restaurant in the moderately fancy chain hotel has a buffet, and it’s not booked up. Now I can spend time in the sewing room, giving thanks for Santa being finished. Or. . . maybe quilting him, before and after our Thanksgiving feast. I used to be a purist, never going out on the holiday because I remember when my son had to work on Thanksgiving and I was ticked off about him not being at the table with family. Funny how things change as you age. My apologies if your son has to work at the local restaurant because little old ladies are too tired to cook. (And PS, I’m not shopping at Target that day, nor WalMart, nor any of the other stores who are open that day. I do have my limits. . . and my inconconsistencies.)

When you are this tired, it’s good to trim the HSTs leftover from the roofs, and start playing around. It’s good to have a piecing marathon behind me as on Monday, papers come in, and on Tuesday, I teach my class on the Pleated Tote at Bluebird Quilts (our LQS), and I need to make samples on how to easily make a zipper pocket in the lining. I loved teaching the last class there and am looking forward to this one.

Happy Sewing!